A monitoring center monitors the operation situations of a plurality of client devices, and detects the abnormality of the client device. Specifically, the monitoring center receives an email for checking the connection that periodically checks the connection from a client device via an email server. Upon receiving an email for checking the connection after passage of a predetermined time or more, the monitoring center determines that an abnormality is generated in the client device. Further, a supporting member directly sends a notification indicating the abnormality is generated in the client device to a user or manager of the client device that detects the abnormality.
In fact, the setting of the email server in the client device is not changed even after changing the email server in a large number of abnormalities detected by the monitoring center. There is a troublesome problem that the supporting member specifies the change of setting of the email server each time and notifies the change of a user of the client device or manager.
Techniques regarding to the monitoring apparatus are disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2004-326667.